faces

My Therapist Asks Me To Write About

The First Time I Noticed My Body // Sloan Drechsel Before: pink light in her room, the pink of late afternoon, pink curtains just like mine. Her blonde hair reflected in the mirror, my blonde hair reflected in her eyes. Beating fast, beating ravenously, my heart which is next to her heart, which is next to her arm, which is next to my arm. Two Girl Scouts in two girl bodies, sitting facing each other on her bed. But before the before: chatting excitedly in the back of the giant lumbering bus, dropped at the front of her neighborhood, walking home with her in the green light that peaks through the dense Southern foliage. An invisible kind of puppy love. And then: girl lips on girl lips, girl tenderness relaxes into girl tenderness. The doorknob twists and girl recoils from girl. And then: a white shame, white-hot, settling into me. A white reminder that pink is not supposed to catch my eye. Then: a white envy, for the clumsy bodies of the boys who chased her around the playground. Then: a white hatred, for the pink body that housed me. After all these years, I sometimes still feel that whiteness. It permeates everything, like an oncoming blizzard. Then: I remember that I did not feel wrong until I was seen. Now: I take the vast emptiness of the white, and I fill it with pink.

faces // Lauren O’Sullivan